Re: tar saying all previous tarballs obscolete?

["John H. Robinson, IV" <jhriv@ucsd.edu>]

On Sat, Feb 23, 2002 at 07:29:37PM -0500, Ed Sweetman wrote:
> Is there a reason why the latest (1.13.25-2) version of tar in debian
> unstable is telling me that all the tars I'm trying to use from
> kernel.org are using obscolete base64 headers?  

you are forgetting the z or j flag to tar:

[jaqque@cthulhu:/tmp]% tar tf linux-2.4.17.tar.gz 
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
zsh: exit 2     tar tf linux-2.4.17.tar.gz
[jaqque@cthulhu:/tmp]% tar tf linux-2.4.17.tar.bz2
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
zsh: exit 2     tar tf linux-2.4.17.tar.bz2

if you have a gzipped version, use the z flag, if you have the bz2
version, use the j flag. if you don't know what version you have, run
file on it:

[jaqque@cthulhu:/tmp]% file linux-2.4.17.tar.gz 
linux-2.4.17.tar.gz: gzip compressed data, deflated, last modified: Fri Dec 21 09:45:54 2001, os: Unix
[jaqque@cthulhu:/tmp]% file linux-2.4.17.tar.bz2 
linux-2.4.17.tar.bz2: bzip2 compressed data, block size = 900k

-john